Dubia food

[SpellKaster4]

So, I've only had my tarantula for about a week now and I'm kinda learning as I go. I work at a pet store so I have a super easy supply of crickets to feed him. That's what I've been using so far but after doing some reading online I decided I would give dubia roaches a try seeing as how they are supposed to be more nutritious. Anyways, I read that dubias can eat pretty much anything and be okay. When I got my crickets I bought a bottle of Fluker's orange cube cricket diet for them, here's the link to the site if anyone wants to look at the info on that food: https://flukerfarms.com/orange-cube-cricket-diet/. My question is if I decide to switch to the roaches would the cricket food be okay for them? My uneducated guess would be yes but I was wondering if anyone on here might have some experience in this area. Thanks in advance guys.

 

[Dave Jay]

It looks alright. It states a list of vitamins it provides but vitamins are not included in the ingredients. Hopefully means that they are referring to vitamins or their precursors that naturally occur in the raw ingredients. This is important as some vitamin supplements can affect the absorption of other vitamins or nutritional elements.
Vitamin supplements usually contain only preformed vitamins, in a balanced diet preformed and provitamins (syn - previtamins) are present, the body will only convert enough provitamins to obtain the required amount of a certain vitamin, therefore a balance is obtained and overdoses are avoided.
One possible problem with the food is that calcium is supplemented and too much calcium in a tarantulas diet is said to cause problems with moulting. Whether this has been proven scientifically or is only backed by anacotol evidence I don't know.
My view is that a large part of a feeder animals nutrition is from the gut contents so providing a balanced, varied diet to your feeders will give the best chance of providing the predator with a balanced diet if only one type of feeder is used.
My advice would be to use the cubes if you find them convenient but supplement the diet with a range of fresh foods, particularly in the hours before using them as feeders.

 

[Tortoise Tom]

I've been keeping roaches since '92. I've tried about everything you could think of and all of it works. For simplicity's sake, I put a handful of dog kibble in one front corner and some "wet" food like orange, potato, carrot, yam, apple, grapes, bell peppers, etc… in the other front corner. I used to use water crystals, but in side by side experiments, I found they did nothing and weren't necessary. I've tried commercial gels and roach diets, and cricket diets too. The roaches eat all of it and just continue on continuing on. All of the animals eating my roaches thrived too.

 

[SpellKaster4]

I kinda had a feeling that would be the case based off what I had read. It seems like no matter what breed of roach you look at they all live through everything. The cricket cubes are supposed to supply water as well so I think what I'll do is use them as water and one food source but also throw in some of the recommended fresh foods too. Seems like the safest course. Thanks for the advice guys!